Known to be proud, regal and beautiful, Cecily Neville was born in the year of the great English victory at Agincourt and survived long enough to witness the arrival of the future Henry VIII, her great-grandson. Her life spanned most of the fifteenth century. Cecily's marriage to Richard, Duke of York, was successful, even happy, and she travelled with him wherever his career dictated, bearing his children in England, Ireland and France, including the future Edward IV and Richard III. What was the substance behind her claim to be 'queen by right'? Would she indeed have made a good queen...

Sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf have long been celebrated for their central roles in the development of modernism in art and literature. Vanessa's experimental work places her at the vanguard of early twentieth-century art, as does her role in helping introduce many key names - Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso - to an unsuspecting public in 1910. Virginia took these artistic innovations and applied them to literature, pushing the boundaries of form, narrative and language to find a voice uniquely her own. Yet their private lives were just as experimental. Vanessa's marriage to art critic...

When the tall, athletic Edward of York seized the English throne in 1461, he could have chosen any bride he wanted. With his dazzling good looks, few were able to resist his charm and promises. For three years he had a succession of mistresses, while foreign princesses were lined up to be considered for his queen. Then he fell in love. Enter Elizabeth Woodville, a widow five years his elder. While her contemporaries and later historians have been divided over her character, none have denied her beauty. When she petitioned the king to help restore her son's inheritance, the young Edward was...

New paperback edition - The interweaving lives of Ida John, Sophie Brzeska and Fernande Olivier: three mould-breaking women who forged modern relationships with extraordinary men (writer Augustus John, and artists Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Picasso).

The five hundredth anniversary of a momentous and spectacular meeting between two rival Renaissance monarchs; a failed bid for peace in Europe.

The life of Honor, Lady Lisle, follows a dizzying narrative arc. Born into a West Country family, her second marriage propelled her into Anne Boleyn's court, as the new step-aunt to Henry VIII.  Her husband, Arthur, was the illegitimate son of Edward IV, bearing the dangerous surname Plantagenet, one of a few survivors of the old regime. At his side, Honor witnessed tumultuous change in England, before heading out to run the Tudor enclave of Calais. Her surviving letters speak of a happy family, domestic arrangements, clothes and food, as well as including snippets of news about Henry's...